Emily Wilson is professor of Classical Studies and graduate chair of the Program in Comparative Literature & Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. In November 2017, W.W. Norton & Company published her translation of the Odyssey, the first known complete translation by a woman in English. Wilson attended Oxford University (Balliol College B.A. 1994 and Corpus Christi College M.Phil. 1996) and Yale University (Ph.D. 2001). In 2006, she was named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship. She lives in Philadelphia with her three daughters and three cats.
In November 2017, Wyatt Mason profiled Professor Wilson in The New York Times Magazine. "When I first read these lines early this summer in The Paris Review, which published an excerpt, I was floored. I’d never read an “Odyssey” that sounded like this. It had such directness, the lines feeling not as if they were being fed into iambic pentameter because of some strategic decision but because the meter was a natural mode for its speaker."
Follow Professor Wilson on Twitter @EmilyRCWilson. Professor Wilson frequently tweets about the Odyssey, translation, and her cats.